North End Market Tour

The tour guide gave us interesting information on the history and culinary roots of the North End area. Along with the tastings, our tour guide, a pastry chef gave us helpful tips on how to incorporate foods, spices and equipment in our home kitchen and recipes. Well worth the time and money.

What a special way to discover- or rediscover- a fantastic Boston neighborhood. Though our family often heads to the N.End for dinner, this tour opened our eyes to the larger picture & the myriad of shops, sounds, & tastes of the community. We can't wait to return to the N.End for a day of food shopping, now that we've been clued in to the great little spots for particular foods & treats. The tour leader did a wonderful job of holding our attention for 3 hours of history, fun facts, clarifications, and we loved the small tastes we were offered at each stop. The tour leader even graciously presented a cake at the bakery stop, for my husband's 60th bday! Overall, highly recommend it!

Our guide was a knowledgeable & enthusiastic guide to the history of the north end & a connoisseur of Italian foods, cooking, & culture. She & the proprietors of the shops on our tour have the same love of the locale & the food culture & loved sharing their passion & experience with us. I have already recommended this delightful tour to friends.

This tour was well presented by our tour guide, Beth. She provided many details and made the tour quite interesting! We received a lot of information and a first hand look at the many restaurants and shops in the North End with a few unexpected surprises such as meeting the artist who painted an otherwise empty brick building and made it beautiful to look at. We also got to sample some delicious food!! Beth was awesome!

This was my husbands first visit to Boston and the North End so I arranged for this activity to be the first event of our trip. I'm so glad I did as I learned as much! Our guide, Beth, was patient and thorough and clearly very enthusiastic toward her task. The samples whetted our appetites and we learned a number of useful tips, e.g., the value of knowing the difference between a male and a female eggplant and how to select a quality balsamic vinegar. We spent a week in Boston and after the tour, we were well equipped with ideas on where to eat and to appreciate the variety of pastries that required our follow-up study in greater detail later in the week. The hand outs were informative, the range of stores visited very representative of the many aspect of regional food and practices, and the linkages made between present day North End and it's history made for a rich experience. If you can't find this tour useful, you shouldn't be visiting the North End.

I can speak on behalf of my entire group when I say that we absolutely loved this tour. It was fun, informative and the samples were great. HIGHLY recommend that you check it out!

My friend and I loved the tour! It was great fun and inspired me to cook!

The tour was wonderful and Beth was a fabulous guide. So many times I have gone to the North End to eat but I have never explored the shops or strayed too far from the main drag. It was so nice to meet some of the shop owners, sample some of the food, and learn about a few hidden treasures. And a tasting of limoncello at the end was the perfect way to end the tour.

We enjoyed the food tour with Beth and loved the food tastings and the lemoncello! We also learned a few new things about certain produce and will definitely be going back to several shops on the tour!

Educational and fun. I enjoyed this tour so much, I am still talking about it. I learned about food in a way that is still influencing the way I look at food, eat my food, prepare it and appreciate it. I learned the history of the North area of Boston and it's changes, and Italy and it's regions. The influences on the foods from Italy and why certain foods are the way they are. Also why foods are eaten the way they are. I enjoyed the culture on the tour, all the little nuances only Michelle could know and share, being a local for the past 40 years and trained as a chef. The tour was a pleasant surprise for sure, much more than I expected. I would highly recommend this tour to everyone that enjoys history, food, sight-seeing and just plain fun!